Solar power's impact on the American west will be larger than the mere footprints of the plants in the Mojave.

As the railroads shaped the American West in the 19th century and the national highway system shaped the region in the 20th century, a new electrical generating and transmission system for the 21st century will leave a lasting mark on the desert, for better and worse. Much of the real significance of railroads and highways is not in their direct physical impact on the landscape, but in the ways that they affect the surrounding landscape and communities. The same is true of big solar and wind generating plants and the power lines that will be laid down to move electricity around.

Look at any map of the West that shows land ownership patterns and you will see what I mean about the railroads. Instead of just a thin pair of tracks, the railroads have left a wide swath of "checkerboard lands" through the territory. For 20 miles on each side of the railroad, companies were granted alternating square sections of land. In much of the West, the other squares have remained public land. Some of the railroad sections were developed, others remain undeveloped, and in both cases the crazy quilt of landownership has presented daunting challenges for land management to this day. Poke around towns along the interstate highway system in the West and you'll find old abandoned town centers that lost their lifeblood as the railroad station was displaced as the heart of the town by a new highway. Later that strip was abandoned when an interstate exit became the key connection to the arteries of the region. More than a few towns lost their souls in the process.

Big solar and wind generating plants and their power lines will also have effects far beyond their direct footprint in the West. This is not an argument against building them. We need alternative energy sources badly, and to really take advantage of them we need to be able to move electricity around far more readily than we can now. The western power grid is a fragmented hodgepodge. It needs to be much better integrated. And that is going to require major power lines across the West.

Trade-offs will have to be made. Some landscapes will be sacrificed. Some species will be forced to move, or will be carefully relocated to special accommodations, like the desert tortoises outside Las Vegas in their million dollar burrows. Deals will be struck to mitigate immediate impacts -- as they must. Not everyone will be happy with these deals. Some people will sue to stop them. That's already happening. In that sense, the process is working. Sufficient attention is being paid to the immediate trade-offs.

The lasting, wider effects of these trade-offs are another matter. The 21st century development of the American Southwest as a Mecca for alternative energy is going to throw off a lot of power and money in the region. There are opportunities for that power and money to do a lot of good. But it is just as likely that these resources will be squandered badly and will leave a lasting negative legacy behind, just as the railroads and the highways, which did good, in some measure, but left new problems in their wakes.

Mitigation money -- and the institutions that control it -- will be key. Right now there are pitched political battles taking place largely outside of the public eye to define and control the funds that are set aside in negotiated trade-offs and legal settlements over power plants and transmission lines. The key questions are who controls those funds and how are they used? Are they used in the immediate vicinity of power plants and transmission lines or far beyond where the needs may, in fact, be greater? Are they used to better human communities, the environment, or both? Are they used to address concerns created by power generation and transmission or something entirely different? In one case, funds in a legal settlement over a gas pipeline are being used to buy out the grazing permits of ranchers on public lands in the West. The connection is tenuous at best, pernicious at worst. The effect may be to hollow out rural communities far away from the gas pipeline itself.

Mitigation funds will shape the institutions that control them -- whether state agencies, county commissions, or nongovernmental organizations. Those institutions will in turn shape the communities in which they work, from state governments to small towns in the rural West. And they will shape the West far beyond the immediate footprint of power plants and transmission lines. So let's remember the effects of the railroads and the highways as we construct these new arteries of power in the West.

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Five days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, its devastating impact is becoming clearer.

Five days after Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, its devastating impact is becoming clearer. Most of the U.S. territory currently has no electricity or running water, fewer than 250 of the island’s 1,600 cellphone towers are operational, and damaged ports, roads, and airports are slowing the arrival and transport of aid. Communication has been severely limited and some remote towns are only now being contacted. Jenniffer Gonzalez, the Resident Commissioner of Puerto Rico, told the Associated Press that Hurricane Maria has set the island back decades.

A small group of programmers wants to change how we code—before catastrophe strikes.

There were six hours during the night of April 10, 2014, when the entire population of Washington State had no 911 service. People who called for help got a busy signal. One Seattle woman dialed 911 at least 37 times while a stranger was trying to break into her house. When he finally crawled into her living room through a window, she picked up a kitchen knife. The man fled.

The 911 outage, at the time the largest ever reported, was traced to software running on a server in Englewood, Colorado. Operated by a systems provider named Intrado, the server kept a running counter of how many calls it had routed to 911 dispatchers around the country. Intrado programmers had set a threshold for how high the counter could go. They picked a number in the millions.

The greatest threats to free speech in America come from the state, not from activists on college campuses.

The American left is waging war on free speech. That’s the consensus from center-left to far right; even Nazis and white supremacists seek to wave the First Amendment like a bloody shirt. But the greatest contemporary threat to free speech comes not from antifa radicals or campus leftists, but from a president prepared to use the power and authority of government to chill or suppress controversial speech, and the political movement that put him in office, and now applauds and extends his efforts.

The most frequently cited examples of the left-wing war on free speech are the protests against right-wing speakers that occur on elite college campuses, some of which have turned violent.New York’s Jonathan Chait has described the protests as a “war on the liberal mind” and the “manifestation of a serious ideological challenge to liberalism—less serious than the threat from the right, but equally necessary to defeat.” Most right-wing critiques fail to make such ideological distinctions, and are far more apocalyptic—some have unironically proposed state laws that define how universities are and are not allowed to govern themselves in the name of defending free speech.

A growing body of research debunks the idea that school quality is the main determinant of economic mobility.

One of the most commonly taught stories American schoolchildren learn is that of Ragged Dick, Horatio Alger’s 19th-century tale of a poor, ambitious teenaged boy in New York City who works hard and eventually secures himself a respectable, middle-class life. This “rags to riches” tale embodies one of America’s most sacred narratives: that no matter who you are, what your parents do, or where you grow up, with enough education and hard work, you too can rise the economic ladder.

A body of research has since emerged to challenge this national story, casting the United States not as a meritocracy but as a country where castes are reinforced by factors like the race of one’s childhood neighbors and how unequally income is distributed throughout society. One such study was published in 2014, by a team of economists led by Stanford’s Raj Chetty. After analyzing federal income tax records for millions of Americans, and studying, for the first time, the direct relationship between a child’s earnings and that of their parents, they determined that the chances of a child growing up at the bottom of the national income distribution to ever one day reach the top actually varies greatly by geography. For example, they found that a poor child raised in San Jose, or Salt Lake City, has a much greater chance of reaching the top than a poor child raised in Baltimore, or Charlotte. They couldn’t say exactly why, but they concluded that five correlated factors—segregation, family structure, income inequality, local school quality, and social capital—were likely to make a difference. Their conclusion: America is land of opportunity for some. For others, much less so.

One hundred years ago, a retail giant that shipped millions of products by mail moved swiftly into the brick-and-mortar business, changing it forever. Is that happening again?

Amazon comes to conquer brick-and-mortar retail, not to bury it. In the last two years, the company has opened 11 physical bookstores. This summer, it bought Whole Foods and its 400 grocery locations. And last week, the company announced a partnership with Kohl’s to allow returns at the physical retailer’s stores.

Why is Amazon looking more and more like an old-fashioned retailer? The company’s do-it-all corporate strategy adheres to a familiar playbook—that of Sears, Roebuck & Company. Sears might seem like a zombie today, but it’s easy to forget how transformative the company was exactly 100 years ago, when it, too, was capitalizing on a mail-to-consumer business to establish a physical retail presence.

The foundation of Donald Trump’s presidency is the negation of Barack Obama’s legacy.

It is insufficient to statethe obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact. With one immediate exception, Trump’s predecessors made their way to high office through the passive power of whiteness—that bloody heirloom which cannot ensure mastery of all events but can conjure a tailwind for most of them. Land theft and human plunder cleared the grounds for Trump’s forefathers and barred others from it. Once upon the field, these men became soldiers, statesmen, and scholars; held court in Paris; presided at Princeton; advanced into the Wilderness and then into the White House. Their individual triumphs made this exclusive party seem above America’s founding sins, and it was forgotten that the former was in fact bound to the latter, that all their victories had transpired on cleared grounds. No such elegant detachment can be attributed to Donald Trump—a president who, more than any other, has made the awful inheritance explicit.

National Geographic Magazine has opened its annual photo contest, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 17.

National Geographic Magazine has opened its annual photo contest for 2017, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 17. The Grand Prize Winner will receive $10,000 (USD), publication in National Geographic Magazine and a feature on National Geographic’s Instagram account. The folks at National Geographic were, once more, kind enough to let me choose among the contest entries so far for display here. The captions below were written by the individual photographers, and lightly edited for style.

What the Trump administration has been threatening is not a “preemptive strike.”

Donald Trump lies so frequently and so brazenly that it’s easy to forget that there are political untruths he did not invent. Sometimes, he builds on falsehoods that predated his election, and that enjoy currency among the very institutions that generally restrain his power.

That’s the case in the debate over North Korea. On Monday, The New York Timesdeclared that “the United States has repeatedly suggested in recent months” that it “could threaten pre-emptive military action” against North Korea. On Sunday, The Washington Post—after asking Americans whether they would “support or oppose the U.S. bombing North Korean military targets” in order “to get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons”—announced that “Two-thirds of Americans oppose launching a preemptive military strike.” Citing the Post’s findings, The New York Times the same day reported that Americans are “deeply opposed to the kind of pre-emptive military strike” that Trump “has seemed eager to threaten.”

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

The president has sided with Luther Strange in the primary matchup, a candidate who has lagged behind his challenger Roy Moore in polling.

Alabama Republicans head to the polls on Tuesday in a special election primary. The race pits former state attorney general Luther Strange against former judge Roy Moore in a fight for the Republican nomination in the race for the Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Polls close at 8 p.m. EST.

Strange has President Trump’s endorsement and has benefited from millions of dollars in spending from political groups aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Even so, Strange, who was temporarily appointed to the Senate seat in February by then-Alabama Governor Robert Bentley, has trailed in the polls, lagging behind his challenger. Moore is a conservative firebrand who was removed from the Alabama Supreme Court in 2003 after refusing to move a monument to the Ten Commandments from the state judicial building.